Hasty generalizations

I don’t like Ubuntu! It’s NOT easy to work with, very SUPER HARD infact. I can’t get my belkin wireless card to install, nor can I get my on-board sound to install.

What good is this OS “Ubuntu” if you can’t go online to the internet OR get sound? I tried for many hours and hours and hours. I gave up. I will stay with VISTA!

At least I can go to the internet with NO problem and listen to music.

But they don’t. It’s not that I’ve become hard-hearted toward newbs, or adopted the self-confident smirk of a Linux geek. It’s because the poster, whoever he or she was, presented their dissatisfaction as a hasty generalization. Think about it this way:

My wireless card and sound card don’t work.

I can’t go online or get sound.

Therefore, “what good is this OS?”

Ah, grasshopper. You’ve committed a simple logical fallacy by assuming since it didn’t work for you, it doesn’t work for everyone, and therefore the OS is worthless. But it does work, probably for more people than just you, which means you’re probably in a minority.

No, what really happened is that you couldn’t get it working, you quit and you went back to Vista. Therefore the error was not with Ubuntu, the error was with you.

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3 thoughts on “Hasty generalizations”

I have played with vista from time to time and am not impressed at all. I find it quite unsetling that sindows had to steal a few things from the Linux distros in order to keep up with the times, such as the multiple workspaces.
Anyways, I’ve been runnig this old 98 Gateway with Ubuntu for like 6 months or so and have enjoyed every bit of the effort I had to put into it to fully understand it, or just getting certain things to work correctly form time to time.

I always find those posts interesting. I’ve installed Ubuntu and it’s various forums on over 30 computers now, and rarely have problems. Some wireless cards issues, but other than that, I’ve been unusually lucky with Ubuntu. I also have Vista. There is more I cannot do on Vista than Ubuntu. I don’t dislike Vista, or XP for that matter. I don’t like some of MS business practices, but some of there software is excellent. Maybe not worth what they charge, but very good.

People who make those statements don’t bother me either. We have the same thing in fitness: “Yoga’s for wimps.”, “Weights are for roid-heads.”

Then, there’s the whole Mac Cult thing. Prettiness counts for a lot these days, I guess. My girlfriend doesn’t care if OS X or Ubuntu is on her laptop, as long as it’s cute, white, and has the lightup apple on it.

If people like MS, they can keep paying for it. Some with Apple. Linux, especially Ubuntu, provides another option for us. I’m thankful we’re not locked down to MS and Apple anymore, if we choose such.

Let the person enjoy their hard earned Vista. If I paid that much for it, I’d expect it to get me coffee in the morning too.

2. Make sure that there is no quick workaround for that hardware (eg. using ndiswrapper for wireless cards)

3. Post: “OMG, your distro SUX – it can’t even handle my $hardware. I’m switching to Vista. Linux is not ready for teh Desktop!” in the community

4. ???

5. Profit

Seriously, some hardware is not supported well because vendors do not care about the open source community. It’s a fact of life. I mean, even Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t have enough money to hire enough developers to reverse-engineer drivers for every possible, unsupported, sound, video and wireless card out there.